I have these memories, horrible memories from my past— I’m huddled in a phone booth with my biological father, a hard cold receiver pressed against one ear, the scruff of his face grating against my cheek and his hot whisper in my other ear. His words described the atrocities he would commit if my mother wouldn’t come back to him. He wanted to hear his words come out of my mouth; he needed my mother to hear these horrible things in the small, trembling voice of a four-year-old boy. Even now as I type these words, my hands shake. I have relived, this memory and others like it in sweat-soaked slumber for most of my life.Each of these memories represents a separate existence, a self-portrait, encapsulating my thoughts, sensations and emotions from a moment in my life. They are the architecture of my identity. If time can be understood as the space that our consciousness travels along then these memories also occupy a specific location in space-time. And while our experience of times passage may be universal our perceptions of those moments are highly personal.As we move through our lives the external world provides each of us with an incessant stream of stimulus and sensations that are processed by our minds and encoded as memories. These processes of memory formation, their subsequent degradation over time and the impact of memory on ones perception of self, fuel my current work. Informed by Hume’s Bundle Theory of Identity and Kant’s concept of Transcendental Idealism, my work seeks to give form to the substances of memory and their corresponding internal locus, representing memory as a substance that occupies a space in time, encapsulating the sensations and cognitions of a moment and forming our self-concept.Through my work I explore metaphors for the internal sites of memory capture, containment and collection from my personal history as a means of connecting with the universal experience of memory formation. The act of drawing is at the center of my process and is a way for me to examine, understand and articulate the vessels that hold the substance of these recollections and access their content. In the drawings, text and image often work together as a means of depicting the markings in ones mind from the processes of cognition. Hand-written text functions as a representation of speech itself, a kind of narrative simultaneously documenting the past and attempting to record perceptions as they happen in the present. In this way the drawings themselves become vessels—filled with idea and image and encapsulating the moments spent embedding them on their surfaces.The vessel as locus for memory imparts associations with containment, circulation, distribution, and transportation on the work and offers an opportunity to play with binary oppositions. Concepts of strength and fragility, fullness and emptiness or presence and absence, create hierarchies in our minds implying that the second term is inferior, almost parasitic, to the first, and are employed in my work as a means of giving voice to the impact of time on anamnesis and the duplicitous nature of memory.Presently, I find myself in new territory, delving deeper into this vein of content, influenced by artists like Wolfgang Laib, Ann Hamilton, Gary Hill, Louise Bourgeois, Nedko Solakov, Doris Salcedo, Ernesto Neto, Anselm Kiefer and Marina Abramovic, I see my role as an artist shifting from the making of images to the fabrication of experience. In my most recent works I have begun to utilize the drawings as plans for the construction of 3-dimensional objects and small installations. If accepted as a participant in an MFA program, it is from this point that I propose to move forward and further pursue the exploration of installation-based work as a means of giving form to my content.Hume describes man as a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity and that are in perpetual flux and movement. In our current culture many of these perceptions happen in front the flat screens of televisions, cell phones or computers, where our personal sense of perspective is lost, where we communicate through the push of cold buttons and where we publish our most intimate moments for public consumption and commercial gain. It is for these reasons that I seek a more intimate means of engaging the viewer and propose to produce works that allow the viewer to physically move through a space and encounter objects, in much the same way that our consciousness travels through time. By engaging them in an experience that is simultaneously physical and temporal, communal and individual, it is my aim to cause the formation of a new memory within them.
